How do you land an internship in your first year of computer science while adjusting to life at university? Helen and Sam share their experiences from first year.
[2:13] When do first-year students start applying for internships?
[3:52] What should you expect when applying for an internship?
[8:35] What should you expect during an interview?
[11:59] What should you expect during the internship?
Mario: Securing an internship is a goal for many of our students. And for some students, the goal may even be to secure an internship that starts just as their first year in university ends. But achieving that goal while simultaneously adjusting to life in university can be a tall order. Juggling a full course load with assignment deadlines, midterms, final exams, inboxes flooded with emails, oof, and that's just the academics! Hi, my name is Professor Mario Badr. I'm joined with Professor Diane Horton, and in this episode, we speak with two students who managed to apply, interview, and secure an internship right out of first year.
Mario: So Diane, you know, whenever I advise 1st year students, one of the most common questions was how to secure a 1st year internship. And my general advice is always to make sure that, you know, you're looking for opportunities and to actually apply. And later eventually, on LinkedIn, I get to see so many of my students update their profile with jobs at so many different places.
Diane: Yeah, I agree. It’s so wonderful to see what our students can do outside of the classroom. And I want to focus on something you said: that students should apply. I think a lot of them hesitate because they’re not sure if they have enough background after first year to qualify for an internship.
Sam: “I didn’t think of it as rejections, I thought of it as almost- inevitable. I was trying to shoot for like that 1% chance of getting an internship, I didn't think it was a guaranteed thing. So, I didn't really take the rejections personally, it was more like, you know, it's going to happen. And if I'm lucky, it won't.”
Mario: That’s Sam, a 1st year student in the 2021-22 academic year. Sam managed to secure an internship at Paper, an education technology company based out of Montreal, Canada. But before that, he felt like he only had a 1% chance at landing an internship. Diane, is that really true?
Diane: Well, it’s hard to put a number on it. But, being aware of when to apply, and the application process itself, will certainly help your chances. And that’s our focus this episode. Let’s step into the lives of two students who applied for and landed an internship as they tackled their 1st year in computer science.
Mario: When do 1st year students start applying to internships? You might imagine that the answer varies quite a bit from student to student. But what if we asked: When can 1st year students start applying to internships? For some companies, the answer might surprise you.
Helen: “…the recruiting usually starts in August, or in the summer before the internship season that you want it to be in. So, I personally started applying in late August, so actually, before my university life officially started.”
Diane: That was Helen. A 1st year student in the same cohort as Sam. She got an internship at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. She had identified that there were programs, like Microsoft Explore, that specifically look for 1st year students.
Mario: That’s awesome. I knew that companies tried to hire students early, but I had no idea that some would start before they even begin 1st year. And I have a sneaking suspicion that most students don’t know this either. So, what about first-year students who don’t know to start applying until later?
Sam: “I started applying for jobs around maybe late January, early February, cause that's when it felt natural to apply to me. I was like, oh, that's when summer jobs will start coming out. And then I talked to some friends, and I find out I'm about three months late on that…”
Diane: Sam clearly followed a different timeline toward his internship. I think what’s important for our listeners to remember though, regardless of what year they are in, is that they shouldn’t give up on getting an internship if they find out some other students started looking well ahead of them. Companies have different timelines for hiring. But of course, the earlier you start applying, the more opportunities you have available to you.
Diane: For most new university students, this is their first time applying for a job in technology. And whenever you do something for the first time, there is naturally some anxiety that comes with it.
Mario: Yeah, absolutely. All my first times interviewing and applying for jobs came with some anxiety. But if you know what to expect, I think that’s helpful. So let’s see if we can help alleviate some of that by talking to Helen and Sam about the application process itself. Helen, can you share a little bit of your experience with the application process?
Helen: “Right. Um, specific to the Microsoft opportunity, there was no cover letter involved, it was just your resume, and you have to go on their career portal, create an account, and then fill in some information, submit a resume, indicate what role you’re interested in, and then hit the Apply button.”
Diane: The process is similar for some other companies, like Google. But not every company has their own career portal or a very large HR department. And so, just like hiring timelines are different from one company to another, the application process can also be a little different. Sam, how did you go about applying for jobs during the semester?
Sam: “Yeah, I basically would just take a night and spend two or three hours sending out, you know, 10 to 20 applications. And I would look through, I started off using Indeed, but I ended up realizing LinkedIn had a job board, and I ended up getting more like small successes via LinkedIn job board where I would get like an asynchronous step, or I also just felt like I could apply them more via LinkedIn often because the LinkedIn has like the quick application”
Mario: Regardless of where you are applying, a successful application gets you a response, but not necessarily a position. If you are applying and not getting any responses, you should reflect on your applications and your resume.
Diane: That’s right. You have to remember that employers are receiving applications from many applicants, sometimes on the order of thousands. If you’ve received a response to your application, that means you’ve actually passed the first “screening”. Helen shares her experience about not only when she heard back, but also the ways that companies might screen their applicants.
Helen: “…I got my phone screen at the very end of August, right before September, I remember. In September, I applied to a few other companies since I didn’t want to just bank on this one specific opportunity since it was so big to me as a first year already. So during September, I heard back from a few other companies about OAs, which are online assessments that kind of give you a few technical problems that you would complete on platforms like HackerRank or LeetCode.”
Diane: There are a wide variety of online assessments that companies may use. Sam gives us some insight, on the various types he has experienced so far.
Sam: “There are three main types, I guess. There’s the type where they flash a question on screen about you as a person, and then you record an answer.
Then there’s the type where they send you, I guess, quote and unquote, LeetCode problems.
And then there’s the type, which I think are the best and actually helpful for the company where they send you a problem, or like a quiz on something you would actually be doing. So, for Paper, it was like a JavaScript quiz where it was like short answer, make this algorithm work, fill in the blank, like word of code here.”
Mario: So earlier, we were talking about how some companies start their hiring process of 1st year students before those students have even started university. But for that to happen it sounds like those students need some pretty solid fundamentals before they can even start applying.
Diane: And Mario, you and I both know that a lot of students don't arrive at university already knowing how to program - they start with us from the beginning. Is it achievable to get an internship for those students at the end of first year? Let's hear what Helen has to say:
Helen: “I think the timelines of applying and like, actually going through the application / recruitment timeline would be a little bit different, since you would want to have some foundation from your university classes before you start applying. So, it would be later in the cycle, which I know sometimes that can be disadvantageous, because these roles fill in on a rolling basis.”
“But I know for specific programs like the Google STEP program for first year applicants, they wait until December to start interviewing applicants, because they want kind of first year students to have at least one semester of university content to be able to test them more evenly or like level the playing field almost like, so I think there’s definitely still possibility. Even at my internship, I met a lot of first year students who just started coding or started programming in their first year of university, and they have never done anything CS related before then, and they still managed to secure these opportunities. So I think there is definitely a possibility.”
Mario: This brings us to the next step in our students’ pursuit of an internship: the interview.
Diane: Helen told us about how she prepared for her interviews.
Helen: “I didn't, I wouldn't say I had a really super strong foundation on a lot of the data structures, maybe I was pretty comfortable with the basic ones like ArrayLists, and that's pretty much it. But there are so many more structures like maps, and also hashing that is something that's often tested in a lot of kind of technical problems. So kind of to add on to more, to have more, better of a knowledge base, I relied on Cracking the Coding Interview book, for kind of reading about these concepts, really learning the basics, and start practicing on paper. But after like I felt pretty comfortable with the concepts described in the book, I felt like LeetCode became a better platform for practicing since it was online with a code editor that I could run tests more easily with. There was also a forum and a community on there to help you with problem solving.”
Mario: You know, I think Helen highlights something really important here. She first identified an area where she expected interview questions but lacked some backgroun, and then sought to address it. Our students come from so many different backgrounds with a variety of prior experience; not everyone needs to prepare the same way or study the same things.
Diane: That’s so true. And while you might have the best of intentions mapping out how you plan to prepare for interviews during the semester, we all know sometimes life gets busy.
Helen: “…I will admit that like especially during midterm season, or as the school ramped up, it is very difficult to keep the momentum going and I did fall off at times. But any sort of practice that you put in, regardless of when, always pays off at some point. So I would recommend doing them early in the school year when you still have time. But if not, like find time whenever you can, if, even if it’s just one problem per week, or even one problem every two weeks, it's still progress that you're making.”
Mario: And sometimes, you really have no choice but to cram for an interview. Sam shares his experience of preparing for an interview during a very busy time of year.
Sam: “…and it was around exams, it was in April, mid April. So I was like, I cannot spend a week preparing for this. I don't have the time. So I say - I think it was a Friday - I'm going to spend all of my Friday learning JavaScript, and learning, there's a specific syntax I was supposed to know ES6, in particular. And what was nice is I already knew React, so I was able to connect the React to the JavaScript and actually understand what some of the things were doing.”
Diane: Of course, it’s not always clear in advance exactly what you will be interviewed on. And even within a company, applicants may be interviewed in different ways. Here is Helen’s experience with the interview process.
Helen: “To be honest, they weren't super transparent about what to expect on the interview day other than the fact that I was going to have two 45-minute interviews with two full time employees. So, from what I've heard from me and friends I've met at my internship, it can be two technical coding interviews or one technical one, one program manager interview or two program manager interviews.
For me, I started off with a, I got interviewed by my person, the person who later became my mentor during my internship, so she is a software engineer. So that was a coding interview. And then the second interview I had with a program manager, and he didn't really ask me product design questions that was more of a discussion of my previous experiences and any product related improvements, I would suggest.”
Mario: Alright, our students, Sam and Helen, they made it through the interview process. And (spoiler alert) from the beginning, they did such a wonderful job that they received job offers. So, we hope this episode has been useful…
Diane: Wait, wait, hold on a second, Mario. We could end the podcast here, but I really want to know, and I'm sure our listeners do, how the internships went.
Mario: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. All right, this episode wouldn't be complete if we didn't share with our listeners what happened. Let's hear from Helen about her experience at Microsoft.
Helen: “Yeah, I had a great time. It was a 12 weeklong internship. And I was in Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, in the United States. So, I specifically worked on this team under Azure, which is the Microsoft Cloud Platform. It's called Azure static web apps, which is a service that builds and deploys web applications on the cloud for customers. What specifically I worked on as an intern was to help developers who may not be as familiar with web applications and/or with building on the cloud, to help them make the process and the service easier to understand and use for them.
“Beyond work, I got to connect with a lot of amazing people that gave me a lot of new ideas and inspired me in many different ways, both interns and full-times at the company. I think Microsoft also really enforces kind of learning and growth while having fun. So, there were a lot of events hosted throughout the summer, especially for interns to learn new skills, but also meet new people try new things and have fun. And I think I really enjoyed the Pacific Northwest summer experience as well.”
Diane: That sounded like it was a really people oriented environment, and quite wonderful. We asked Helen about how that translated into the work itself, what it was like working on a team, what the collaborations were like.
Helen: “I think the Explore program is a really great opportunity for students who are kind of stepping like making their first step in the tech industry, because it assigns you to like a pod, which is what we call, it usually consists of two to three Explore interns. So, you kind of work as a team, as a relatively close-knit small team together on a project. And you're guided by one or few mentors, under your manager. So, I was working with two other Explore interns on our specific project. And behind us was two of our mentors, and basically our entire, like, small sub team behind us supporting us. So, there were more close knit, like collaborations between me and my two teammates. But also, um, we needed help, which was really often, we would ask, like the surrounding bigger team of full-time employees around us as well.”
Mario: Now, Sam's experience was a little bit different because his internship was remote. Let's hear from Sam about what it's like to work remotely.
Sam: “There’s great things about remote work. It’s really convenient, it’s really easy to be very productive because you can make it so there are no distractions. And you can still get to know your coworkers really well, but you'll never meet them necessarily. So Paper was based in Montreal. So even if like, there were meetups, I couldn't go to them. So especially because there were six frontend interns. I think three were masters students, one was a former teacher, the other was like going into third year.
So, you know, I was much younger than most of the interns. I was the youngest intern even compared to the person who's going into third year. And going into that it feels really intimidating as a first year, especially when you cram all of JavaScript in a day. It's like, am I even supposed to be here? Or did I get lucky? And I think that kind of stuck around for most of the internship, whether that was valid or not, kind of irrelevant. I could recognize I was doing good work, my coworkers would tell me I was doing good work. But it was, it kind of increased the natural imposter syndrome that I was already having.
On the other hand, the work culture at Paper was really great. And the way they integrate remote work was really great. So while I didn't get to meet my co-workers, I did know my coworkers, and I still keep in touch with a lot of them, because I had a lot of fun that summer talking to them.”
Diane: Now, many people would say it's really impressive that Sam was the youngest by far and the most junior person by far to land that particular job. And that's really wonderful. But at the same time, it left him feeling a bit like he maybe didn't belong. Sam shared with us how he managed that feeling.
Sam: “Yeah, I think. I mean, not to say it was a nice feeling. But it was like a good feeling. For my, I guess motivation…
… I felt like I went in with what I thought would be the lowest expectations. I'm the youngest, least experienced, et cetera. But that kind of both took pressure off me and put the right type of pressure on me. So I was like, okay, I'm the least experienced, I can ask as many questions as I want, I can really treat this as a learning opportunity. And, you know, I'm going to try and work harder than everyone else, and like, get more done, and really show that, you know, they should be hiring more first year students. Because, you know, we are passionate and motivated and can do a great job.”
Diane: So Sam and Helen both landed internships for their summer after first year, but in many ways their experiences were really different. So Mario, what do you think are the key takeaways?
Mario: Yeah, actually, I think I have two takeaways here. And the first is to start applying as early as you can. The earlier you start, the more opportunities that are going to be available to you, so why close those doors. And then the second one is, you know, start preparing early and try to do a little bit every week. You want to start prepping things like your resumes or reviewing problems that you know might be asked you on an interview. And if you're able to prep a little bit at a week, it's not as insurmountable a task as when you must cram for something. At the same time, you know, don't feel bad if you fall a little bit behind while prepping. You know midterms come up, exams come up, assignment deadlines come up. So cut yourself some slack and allow yourself a little bit of wiggle room so that you can come back to prepping at a later time.
Diane: That's a really great advice, Mario, and I hope that our listeners found it helpful to hear about the experiences of Sam and Helen, and we really thank them for sharing that with us.
Mario: My name is Mario Badr
Diane: And I’m Diane Horton
Mario and Diane: And you are In The Loop!